


In Your Neighborhood

by thewightknight



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Animal Death, Cannibalism, Murder, Serial Killers, human death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 18:08:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4715546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewightknight/pseuds/thewightknight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Bedelia had walked out the door with her suitcases?  What if she'd started over, a new name, a new life?  What if she'd lived out her life far far away from Hannibal and Will and Alana and Jack, pretending to be a simple widow living in suburbia?  And what if something decades later made her revert, just for a time, into the creature that Hannibal had tried to make her?</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Your Neighborhood

**Author's Note:**

> [I made a gifset for this](https://thewightknight.tumblr.com/post/150539153456/what-if-bedelia-had-walked-out-the-door-with-her), because I could.

You know how you always hear folks say good things about serial killers? “He was such a nice, quiet man.” “He always kept to himself, never bothered anyone.” “I just can’t believe he’d do something like that.”

Well, no one said that about old man Forster after the police took him away.

The news reports were full of his neighbors saying nasty things about him. But, apparently, he was a nasty old man. At least that’s what Mrs. Smith, his next-door neighbor, told the reporter from Channel 8 who covered the story. “He always swore at anyone that walked past his house, even children. Kept telling them to stay off his darn lawn. Of course, he didn’t say ‘darn,’ you know," she confided. “Mouth worse than any sailor. He didn't used to be like this, though. When his wife was alive, she kept him in line. But she died; let me see, nine years ago now. Poor dear.” It took a considerable amount of cajoling to get her to allow herself to be interviewed, but he persisted, using every ounce of charm in his considerable arsenal.

Mrs. Halstead, who was head of the neighborhood block committee, had no such qualms about speaking to him. "Look at his yard!” she exclaimed. "It's a disgrace, the state he left it in!" When the interview was played, the camera obligingly provided a pan of the house. They focused on the peeling paint and the sagging garage, and flashed to knee-high grass interspersed with rusty trashcans and several dilapidated vehicles propped up on cinderblocks at several points. The camera couldn’t convey the odors emanating from the yard but the expressions on Mrs. Halstead’s and the reporter’s faces gave the viewing audience the definite impression that Jack Forster didn’t grow roses.

“He had six dogs, you know. Six! And he never cleaned up after them. And he didn’t take out his trash all that often, either. I wouldn’t walk across that lawn unless I was wearing hip waders,” Mrs. Halstead declared for the camera. “Best thing for this neighborhood, those dogs being picked up by animal control after he was arrested. At least four mailmen have been bit by those animals.” She paused, and then said in a despairing voice, “Do you know what he did to the property values on this block?”

It’d been about eight months before that the first carcasses had been found in the park, just a few blocks over. Squirrels, mostly, with an occasional rabbit or pigeon. The first few were just poisoned. The next ones were butchered. Little Johnny Mays had found the first bloody piles of fur. He got his own interview out of it, got to be on the 6 o’clock news, to the envy of all his friends. They all muttered amongst themselves about the unfairness of it all. Why couldn’t they have tripped over a mangled fuzzy body so they could have been interviewed? And then get ice cream from the reporter after the interview, like Johnny had? Life just wasn’t fair, they all agreed.

“At first we thought it was those hippies that just bought the O’Mallory house last winter,” said Mrs. Halstead, in a part of her interview that did not make the six o’clock news. “I’m still positive they’re Satanists. Who else would dress in black and burn candles and incense all the time?” She sniffed disdainfully. “Who knows? Maybe they put that nasty old man up to it. Time will tell. Time will tell.” When she looked at the old O’Mallory house, she got the same expression on her face as she’d had when looking at old man Forster’s yard.

A month or two of squirrels went by, and then the cat was found. “Luckily, it wasn’t anybody’s pet,” said Jason Grimley to the same reporter from Channel 8. He owned the three-storey house on the corner, the one with the four-car garage and the massive satellite dish. “I mean, can you imagine how the owners would have felt? But it was only a stray. I mean, if it’d been my wife’s cat, it would have been a lot different. More gruesome, if you know what I mean.” He paused. “Well, not that it wasn’t gruesome, all torn apart like that.” His voice dropped to a conspiratorial aside. “And I heard there were Parts missing!” You could hear the capitol letter when he spoke. “But if it was our cat, it would have been, well, a lot more personal.” Mr. Grimley refused to be interviewed again when his neighbor’s toy poodle was killed six weeks later.

The police had the carcasses investigated by the coroner and a local veterinarian. The two of them confirmed that the killings weren’t the work of a stray animal. The cuts were too clean and regular, the vet told a reporter. All the animals he’d examined had been cut the same way. Butchered, he said, like farm animals for the dinner table. The reason some of the carcasses were “a bit messy,” as he put it, was because some local strays and scavengers had found the carcasses before people had. He confirmed that some of the organs were missing from each of the animals he’d examined. The hearts and livers, especially, had been removed.

"We've all started keeping our pets in," Mrs. Smith told the reporter over a cup of tea in her kitchen. She'd invited the man in when he knocked on her door. After all, he'd been around so much the past few months he was starting to feel like part of the neighborhood. "Here, have another cookie. I just baked them today." She was a retired art teacher, she’d told him when he first interviewed her, and cooking was her hobby. Her kitchen was one of the nicest he’d ever seen. She took her hobbies seriously, Mrs. Smith did.

"It's so nice to see someone appreciate my cooking,” she said as he practically inhaled the three cookies she put in front of him. “I make biscuits for Empress, but it's just not the same." She paused, and ruffled the ears of an elegant whippet who’d been sitting under her chair, eyeing the reporter mournfully when he didn’t drop a crumb. 

"Poor Empress. She misses being able to run around in the yard all day. I only let her into the front yard, because there's our hedge to keep him from being harassed by that man's awful dogs." She made a disdainful sniff in the direction of old man Forster's house. "He still lets his dogs out all the time. But whoever's doing these terrible things probably couldn't get near those awful beasts without getting butchered himself. You know, they bit the nice man who reads the electric meters just last week." She put a dozen cookies into a plastic bag, dark chocolate and pistachios with sea salt, and sent them home with the reporter. He was the envy of the newsroom the next day.

The body count was averaging out to about 7-8 carcasses per month. But since moving up to pets the killer wasn't striking as often. The high average was entirely due to the initial squirrel spree. The killer had chopped up an awful lot of squirrels.

When asked why the killings were tapering off, everyone had a different idea. Mrs. Peterman, who lived the next block over, voiced the most popular one. "Well, the pets are bigger, you know, so the organs are bigger.” She paused, and then said in a conspiratorial whisper, "You did hear that all the animals were missing parts, didn't you?" She gave an artistic shiver, which almost managed to conceal her glee in being able to deliver this gory tidbit to her neighbor, who she knew hardly ever watched the news. Her neighbor passed along this theory to three other people at the corner grocery later than afternoon and it was the talk of the neighborhood by the weekend. 

Mrs. Peterman was given credit for the brilliance of her reasoning, which made her a bit nervous at first, because it wasn't really her theory at all. She'd gotten it from sweet old Mrs. Smith when they’d run into each other during one of their evening walks. But Mrs. Smith never spoke up and claimed the idea had been hers so Mrs. Peterson got to reign supreme as the queen of gossip for the next several months.

Come summertime there was a break in the appearance of new bodies. Police ventured that longer daylight hours were making things more difficult for the killer. When six weeks had passed without a new grisly find the reporter visited Mrs. Smith again. He found her making a huge batch of chicken soup instead of cookies, while sneezing daintily into a handkerchief.

“Call me Della, dear. You’ve been around so much you’re almost family now.” He compromised, calling her Miss Della, causing her to whole face to light up. 

You could tell she’d been stunning when she was younger and she still had a regal air about her. Even though her nose and eyes were red with irritation, her hair was still coiffed and she was dressed in a blouse, probably silk, and slacks, crisp and creased, so unlike the brightly colored velour tracksuits other women her age wore.

When they got back to discussing the animal killings, she ventured forth her theory on why they’d tapered off. "Well, it’s because he's god the same cold everyone else has," she sniffled. "Id's just awful!" She checked her soup, stirred it a bit. "I've been down width it for almost a month now." The reporter got sent home with a jar of the soup this time. Mrs. Smith told him it was a Chinese medicinal recipe learned from her late husband. When he nuked it in the microwave for lunch the next day all his coworkers complained for hours about the smell. Luckily, scent doesn't carry over the airwaves, and the viewing public remained blissfully unaware.

The killer made up for lost time the next month. That's when they found the first human victim. There was a corner of the park with a couple of benches that vagrants used occasionally, despite local police's efforts to keep them out of the neighborhood. The weather was unusually cool for early autumn so it was several days before the body was found. Police refused to comment on the condition of the body but someone leaked to the press that yes, the body had been butchered in the same fashion as the animal victims, and the heart and liver were indeed missing, along with a rather large section of meat out of each thigh.

It was about a month later that Mrs. Smith called 911, at ten-thirty on a Thursday night. She complained that old man Forster's dogs had been barking for hours and he'd turned up his radio to drown them out. The local precinct made semi-regular visits to the Forster residence for various reasons so sending a patrol car out to investigate was not uncommon.

Normally, the unit would arrive, the unlucky officer would stand on the sidewalk outside the fence and shout for Mr. Forster, who would call the dogs in for the evening and shout at the officers for a while. Then he'd go inside and turn down his radio or TV and the neighborhood would have a few weeks of peace.

This time when Officer Morgan started shouting from the sidewalk there was no answer. He hollered for about 10 minutes and then made a half-hearted attempt at going through the gate. After being immediately charged by the unfriendly and rather hungry looking mutts he made a circuit of the fenced-in yard to see if he could see Mr. Forster through any of the windows, and then, frustrated, retreated to his patrol car to radio in. 

"He was an old man, after all," Officer Morgan said at the court proceedings. "When he didn't answer, I thought he might have had a heart attack or fallen or something."

After another twenty or so minutes of shouting with no result, Officer Morgan got the dispatcher to call in animal patrol and got authorization to go into the house to look for Mr. Forster. By now the neighbors had started to notice the unusual happenings. A few of them came out onto porches in bathrobes and slippers to watch the proceedings. 

Animal control had to tranquilize the dogs but once they were happily sleeping the sleep of the drugged Officer Morgan and his newly arrived backup, Officer Newton, were able to approach the front door. It was locked, of course, but they broke the glass next to it and let themselves in.

They found Mr. Forster passed out at the kitchen table, an almost-empty fifth of Jim Beam beside him, and what appeared to be beef stew boiling over on the stove. On the cutting board beside the stove were a cleaver and a slab of meat, still partially covered in freezer wrap.

"I went to go turn off the stove and got a good look at his cutting board." Officer Morgan paused in his testimony for a moment, swallowing a few times, then continued. "It still had skin on, and there were these really fine, short black hairs sticking out, and when I looked closer I could see what appeared to be a part of a tattoo on one edge."

While Officer Morgan was making his gruesome discovery, Officer Newton was trying to rouse old man Forster. "From the looks of him, he'd really drunk all of that fifth at once," Newton said during his testimony. "I was sure he'd given himself a first-class case of alcohol poisoning. I was getting ready to tell Morgan we needed to call an ambulance when he ran out of the kitchen like his pants were on fire." Officer Morgan was, in fact, trying to make it outside before he lost his donuts. He made it, barely, and spent the next minute or so vomiting into the rather scraggly bush that grew at the end of Forster's porch.

When he was done heaving his guts out Officer Morgan got onto the radio again. His captain, on hearing him out, went and dragged his neighbor, who also happened to be a judge, out of bed, and scraped together a search warrant in record time. While Mr. Forster was in the emergency room recovering from getting his stomach pumped, officers searched his house and found several packages of frozen meat in his basement freezer. The meat from his cutting board and these packages were sent off for analysis. The analysis of the meat from his freezer came back as as dog liver. Forensics matched the piece from his cutting board as the missing part of the murdered vagrant's left leg. Pictures submitted to the court illustrated the match to the tattoo on the corpse's upper left thigh and hip.

Mr. Forster got to go straight from the hospital to a jail cell.

All through the questioning and trial Forster maintained his innocence. "I'd never hurt no one, nothing," he said. "I just wanted to be left alone." He claimed he'd found the bottle of Jim Beam in his mailbox that afternoon and had drunk himself silly. The first time he'd ever seen the meat on his counter or the packages in his fridge were when police had shown him pictures, he claimed. According to him, someone had snuck into his house and planted it all.

When asked how an intruder had managed to get past his dogs, and his locked door, which showed no signs of forced entry before the police had broken the glass, he'd scowl, mutter, and repeat his insistences.

Needless to say, the trial was swift, the sentencing harsh, and right now old man Forster is sitting in a jail cell, still scowling, still muttering. Animal control took away the dogs. One was actually adopted and rehabilitated by one of the volunteers at the pound. The other five were put down after biting workers. Forster's house was sold. He had to, to cover the expenses of the trial. The neighborhood committee managed to gather enough together funds to purchase the place and then the neighbor residents worked to clean and fix it up, paint it, and landscape the yard. Mrs. Smith made lunch every day for the workers. 

A nice couple bought it the week it went up for sale. They knew the history, but the price was too tempting, and the neighbors all seemed so nice.

******************************************************

Bedelia hummed happily to herself as she fixed Empress her dinner bowl. The dog was sulking over the plain food, as she'd gotten used to her little extra treats. But that's all done now and thank goodness, Bedelia thought, even if it was for a good cause. It felt strange, having shed her Della Smith skin for a time. She hadn’t been herself in so long. She needed to put it back on, she knew, if she was going to finish her life in the quiet and solitude she’d sought oh so many decades ago. But she’d savor the brief interlude for just a bit longer.

Hannibal had taught her so many things, and even though it had been decades the old skills came back quickly. It was nice to know that her memory was still sharp as ever. A few pills in the bottle of water she’d given the homeless woman made incapacitating her so easy and making friends with unfriendly dogs was a piece of cake with homemade treats to pave the way. It was a good thing old man Forster's daughter had died of cancer several years ago. That meant there was no one to know that she had a spare key to his house, given to her "just in case" by the worried girl after her mother died.

Yes, things had worked out quite well. No more barking dogs and loud radio when she was trying to sleep, no more bad smells wafting through her windows from a weedy, ill-kept yard, no more swearing every time someone dared to step foot on the sidewalk outside the Forster home. Peace and quiet had been restored, something the neighborhood had been lacking for so long. And the new neighbors were such nice people. The husband had told her today that they were expecting their first child next June. Hopefully it didn't cry all the time. She'd hate to think that something else would come along to disturb her peace and quiet.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been picking at the bones of this story forever, trying to write an original horror story and never satisfied with the results. Finally I gave in, added a tablespoon of Bedelia, a _soupçon_ of Hannibal and _voila_! Dinner is served.
> 
> Feel free to come say hi over on [tumblr](http://thewightknight.tumblr.com/).


End file.
